In The News

By Kari Sonde
Mother Jones

As Congress regroups after the midterms, the farm bill is back on the table. The legislation, which comes up for review twice every 10 years, funds agricultural programs in addition to food aid and conservation efforts.

By Chloe Sorvino
Forbes

One of the largest fires to burn in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, the Rim Fire tore through 257,000 acres on the edge of Yosemite National Park in 2013. Not long after firefighters doused the flames, a fleet of bulldozers and trucks arrived, sent by billionaire Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson.

By Justin Gillis
The New York Times

With long strides, Chad T. Hanson plunged into a burned-out forest, his boots kicking up powdery ash. Blackened, lifeless trees stretched toward an azure sky. Dr. Hanson, an ecologist, could not have been more delighted. “Any day out here is a happy day for me, because this is where the wildlife is,” he said with a grin.

By Brittany Patterson
E&E Reporter

The Rim Fire blazed through the alpine forest of California’s Sierra Nevada in 2013, growing into one of the largest and most expensive wildfires in the state’s history. Today, many researchers are racing to discover how this new fire regime is affecting California’s diverse landscapes, from the highest subalpine forests to shrubby chaparral.

By Joshua Emerson Smith
San Diego Union Tribune

California’s forests could benefit from more fires, according to scientists and state officials tasked with protecting people and property from high-intensity blazes. The state’s ongoing epidemic of dead or dying trees has stoked fears about increased wildfires, but scientists and state officials agreed the dead wood may not be the threat many believe. Rather, they expressed the need for longer-term strategies to protect backcountry homes and businesses.

By Joshua Emerson Smith
San Diego Union Tribune

As a record number of trees stand dead or dying in California’s forests due to drought and beetle infestations, concerns are mounting that the die-off is creating an abundance of fuel likely to trigger wildfires that could threaten homes and lives. However, an emerging body of science finds little evidence to support these fears.

By Joshua Emerson Smith
San Diego Union Tribune

As wildfires burn in Southern California, a debate is smoldering about what to do with millions of dead and dying trees — which have been ravaged by drought and beetle species up and down the state.

Mary Ellen Hannibal
Huffington Post

A little more than a week ago, I drove into Yosemite National Park for a week-long, California Master Naturalist immersion course. I was euphoric, about to sequester in beauty to study deeper levels of what Shakespeare called “nature’s infinite book.” Heading in from Oakdale, mile upon mile of mountainous hillside was covered in rusty brown dead trees. . . . The California landscape evolved with lightning-strike fires, and Native Californians used fire to manage their food sources, both animal and vegetable. We have been suppressing fire and battling fire on the landscape for more than a hundred years, with the idea that it is a destructive force to contain. We have stopped a natural cycle from turning – for the moment.

By Jodi Peterson
High Country News

Congressional Republicans are pushing two bills, supported by the timber industry, that would speed up logging in national forests after wildfires and reduce environmental review, despite science showing timber salvage harms essential wildlife habitat.

By Nigel Duara
Los Angeles Times

During the dry summer of 2011, wind gusts sparked a fire on federal land that burned for five weeks over an area the size of Manhattan. Federal foresters decided the towering ponderosa pines would never return and declared the area dead.

But a growing body of fire research indicates that the federal salvage strategy creates more problems than it solves by stunting tree regrowth, denying habitat to a variety of species and increasing the risk of erosion.

By Louis Sahagún
Los Angeles Times, Science & Medicine

In the latest round in a 15-year legal battle to keep the California spotted owl safe from U.S. Forest Service logging policies, federal wildlife authorities have agreed to reconsider an earlier decision to deny the timid raptor protection under the Endangered Species Act.

New research, [ ], indicates that thinning and post-fire salvage logging are “the main threat to the spotted owls’ survival,” according to a petition for listing filed late last year by the Wild Nature Institute and the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute.

By David Downey
The Press Enterprise

Not many would suggest that it was lucky the Lake fire torched nearly 50 square miles of the San Bernardino National Forest this summer. But Big Bear ecologist Chad Hanson called it a “wonderful stroke of luck for the aspen.”

Barely two months after flames incinerated a rare Southern California aspen grove, lush, waist-high and knee-high trees with fat leaves are shooting up through the charcoal-black ashen bed of the forest floor.